50 Minutes of 76

Yes, off topic shitposting is best contained to spoiler text if it is large like Hassknecht's penis. Notice I did not say my penis....

From IGN's shitty website:

The thing I can’t stop thinking as I cross Appalachia is how quiet everything seems. Bethesda might have taken the unexpected sideways step of turning another of its largest single-player properties into a multiplayer game, but I don’t think I’d term this a “massively” multiplayer RPG. This world is vast – four times larger than Fallout 4, apparently – and it’s clear that’s part of the plan. Fallout 76 feels oddly lonely for an online game and, after three hours with it, that’s for better and worse.

Bethesda still won’t confirm exactly how many players will be dropped into a single instance of its game world, but I was told it will be in the region of a few dozen. Against the wide backdrop of Appalachia – the name given to 76’s West Virginia setting – that really isn’t a great deal. Since announcement, Bethesda's made clear that every human you meet will be a real person, but it’s only in playing the game you realise quite what an effect that has.

When you’ve been exploring alone for 20 minutes, come up against a horde of Scorched (a new ghoul-like enemy type, seemingly tied into the game’s story about what happened to those that didn’t make it into a Vault-Tec facility) and see a high-level stranger in Power Armour suddenly wade into the fray to help, it gets across exactly what Bethesda wants: meeting another human should feel like an actual event.

Crucially, that event shouldn’t feel primarily like a threat. We’ve explained how PvP works in far more detail elsewhere, but my hands-on goes some way towards proving that Bethesda’s own Vault-Tec-like behavioural experiment works. Several players shoot me, bringing up an alert on my screen – if I ignored that and they put me down they’d become a “Wanted Murderer”, earning nothing of value for killing me, while putting a bounty on their head for every other player to collect. It’s enough to make every player who takes a potshot at me never follow through. Even if they did, dying simply has you drop the Junk you’re carrying, useful for crafting or selling, but not necessary for survival. If you don’t want to chance even that, you can turn on a Pacifist mode at any time, meaning you can’t do damage to other players, and vice versa.

The game’s planned proximity voice chat sadly isn’t working in our demo, but will presumably help players work out whether they want to fire back and begin a duel (and yes, you can mute anyone who just won’t shut up). Again, Bethesda won’t give specifics, but I’m told that damage is ‘normalised’ across player levels, meaning fighting someone with a far higher level is still possible. The message is clear – PvP is at your discretion, more an accent to the wider game than the entire point of it.

So what is that wider game? The thrust is very much on the familiar side. For a start, Fallout 76 feels startlingly similar to Fallout 4, from the odd trundle of how you move, to the older game’s action-oriented gunplay, even down to how you navigate your arm-mounted Pip-Boy’s menus. Even character customisation is functionally identical, as you yank and morph your character’s face into an acceptable (or just amusingly gross) shape.

The biggest change is the time-stopping VATS, which has naturally had to adapt for a world that can’t be paused. This now functions something like an auto-aim – as long as it’s active, you don’t need to point at an enemy to fire at it, instead working on pure percentages for whether you hit. In the process of changing it’s lost its appeal somewhat and, while it can be upgraded to target specific body parts, I only found myself using it to hit tiny, fast-moving targets like the new (and excellent) three-headed Opossum enemies.

The structure of Fallout’s quests also extends to 76. This might be a multiplayer game, but working through its world feels very much like its offline counterparts. After leaving the titular Vault 76, you’re immediately on a mission to find your old Overseer, which in turn leads you to new areas, and a ballooning list of side-quests, ranging from the mysterious (finding the source of rogue radio signals asking for help) to the downright strange (I entered one area to be told to “Kill a Wendigo while wearing a clown costume”).

But that promise of human characters always being players leaves me a little worried, because of its side-effect on quests. One early mission asked me to look for a Settler who’d left to test the local water. Except the mission was given by a voice recording, the Settler was a corpse, and the reward was given by a computer terminal.

I'm dead serious, everything about it looks like it'd be a mod.
The only "new" thing would be the perk cards and stuff but even that looks like it could come from a mod.

The way player names look, the way VATS is set up, the way trading works, the way emoticons work.
Everything about it just feels like it comes out of a mod.

The build your own camp isn't new.
The UI is the same.
Looting is the same.
Gunplay is the same.
Crafting is the same.
Everything from Fallout 4 is in there with zero modification except where it is absolutely needed.

And even there the modification feels halfassed.
If you took this footage and put it in Fallout 4's worldmap it'd be a believable mod showcase.

It looks 'that much' like a mod.
And I mean, a shitty mod at that.

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Maybe it is a mod? Maybe this is the next stage of Bethesda's 'Creation Club'.... on the DL to avoid backlash.

They had no issues breaking the lore that they didn't even made, not surprised that they break their own lore. Can't wait for the people that called "lore nazies" to those that cared about lore consistency to suddenly care about the lore and say Bethesda is declining.

It's a revolving door. There's a new generation of acolytes waiting to shout "iTs tHeIr lOrE aNd ThEy CaN dO wAtEvEr ThEy wAnT."

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Pretty much this. This is why I in general never have any confidence in people or companies that continue franchises made by other people, only a handful that pulled it off and even added to it such as Retro did with Metroid Prime.
Others... well then you get a Bethesda. (or an Abrams, Orci, Kurtzman, Lindeloff, Rian Johnson)

But I am pretty sure that most of the people who are going to play this game will not concern themselves to long about it. "Casuals" is such a common used word now by die hard gamers to describe the mainstream audience in a derogatory way but it sure is deserved.

That Brotherhood of Steel retcon really is incredible and Pete's response says it all. They really don't give a fuck anymore. They can't even pretend to care. A similar incident happened with the Jet retcon in FO4. I think Pete responded with a typical "who cares, we own it so fuck you" kind of response.

Man, this is sounding even lamer than I thought. So it's basically Destiny + the Division, with all the problems those had. A couple dozen players per instance? Is Bethesda developing a game for the PS3 era?